09:41 – I’m still working on the earth science manual. As always recently when I sit down to write, I’ve noticed that my endurance is not what it used to be. Fifteen years ago, even ten, I could do heads-down writing for 10, 12, 14 hours a day for weeks on end. Nowadays, I’m tired after four or five hours, and six or eight is my absolute limit. Oh, I can sit there longer and type words on the screen, but there’s no point. What I can produce for six or eight hours a day is useful output; anything after that is just time wasted because the output is not acceptable. It takes more work to clean it up and fix it than it would take just to start from scratch.
I’m afraid the Republicans are going to cave. They need to remember that the reason they were elected was to stop Obama and the Democrats by any means necessary from destroying the economy and the country. Refusing to pass an increase in the debt limit is a good way to do that, and polls show that a majority of citizens want them to do just that. Force the government to live within its means. Cut spending with a meat-axe, cut taxes, cut the size of government dramatically, and kill ObamaCare. That’s what they were elected to do, and they need to do it. If Obama chooose to default rather than cut spending elsewhere, fine. That’s on him and the Democrats.
Ah, but they weren’t elected ENOUGH, were they? Too many sheeple stayed home…
The two Jerrys have opposite views. Pournelle is, as usual, eminently sensible. Jerry Coyne, his fanboys and fangirls are lunatic fringe Democrats who are uncritically supporting Obama.
I think the Republicans are idiots and agree they’ll cave. Why they got in to a fight they can’t win is beyond me. And, amazingly enough, I agree with Bill on this issue: Silence is consent. The non-voters are almost as much to blame as the people who voted Democrat.
It’s a fine balance, Bill. Too many Democrats, and they destroy the economy and country. Too many Republicans, and we end up with a theocracy. Gridlock is the best we can hope for.
I’ve heard the “sheeple” and the bit about the non-voters a lot by now and like the tales of Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, it fails to impress any longer. The political system in this country is badly broken and the voting and election infrastructure is a total charade. Of course the Stupid Half of the War Party will cave; that is what they’ve done best now for decades. They’re all just kicking that default can down the road some more, so that in the end, the pain and suffering will be that much greater.
Maybe if folks who live in former British colonies that remain colonies ought to spend some time here to see just how awful the political system is now. Assuming that information isn’t available to them via books and the net for some reason. And from here, their own system looks none too stable or honest, either.
Silence in this case is most definitely not consent; it is a reasoned refusal to participate any longer in one’s victimization by the ruling elites and becoming a laughingstock to them.
51 here this morning and muted sunlight. Approaching peak foliage.
I don’t see how any independent voter could vote democrat after the Obummer shutdown debacle. Surely they can see this guy is saying do what I say or suffer. Park service giving tickets, pulling guns, blocking highway pull offs to look at the Teton. Give me a break.
Now the reported cost of the OshitCare web site. And that was probably the lowest bidder and political payback to some libturds third cousin:
http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/10/report-glitchy-healthcare-gov-cost-taxpayers-more-than-634-million-to-build/
Dave, you could have voted Libertarian. You didn’t so you’re an accomplice.
“We paid $634 million for the Obamacare sites and all we got was this lousy 404”:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/opinion/obamacare-healthcare-gov-website-cost/
“We, the taxpayers, seem to have forked up more than $634 million of the federal purse to build the digital equivalent of a rock.”
Oh good, these are the same people who want to run the USA healthcare system. I was wondering if they were competent enough to do so.
Surprise!
http://www.sfgate.com/opinion/saunders/article/Obama-sold-voters-bill-of-goods-on-health-care-4876722.php
in the SF news no less.
“Dave, you could have voted Libertarian. You didn’t so you’re an accomplice.”
Bullshit. That’s like voting for Mickey Mouse. Not a snowball’s proverbial chance in this country, ever. Best the libs can hope for is maybe selectman in a town like this or dogcatcher. If I vote I am an accomplice to a Bolshevik criminal thug junta; no thanks.
Dave is right. The country does not want either Repubs or Demos running the country, but there is no alternative. As I have mentioned several times before, guys like Ron Paul, shoot themselves by being extremists and calling for things like the UN to get out. Although everybody I know wants less government, they do not want to stop associating with the rest of the world. Repubs are hypocrites who say they will reduce government, then once elected, do the exact opposite and make it bigger and more expensive than ever. There is no one and no party on the horizon that will actually do what the electorate wants. I agree with Dave: voting for one or the other is a sure vote for what the electorate doesn’t want! Not voting IS a vote and a message.
There it is; we can’t keep waxing ecstatic over the next Repub, Independent, or Libertarian “savior” to come and help us from over the rainbow. They either don’t have any chance at all and will be sabotaged and sandbagged by the Party like Paul was, or they get in and go to Mordor, breathe the toxic vapors there and immediately fall in love with the atmosphere and the scum that run the place.
@Lynn; you may be right about supporting your son soon in school; they’re deliberately targeting certain groups:
http://www.legion.org/veteransbenefits/217389/shinseki-shutdown-%E2%80%98directly-threatens%E2%80%99-vets
Well, many years ago I suggested an easy, certain solution to all this: an open season on politicians every year, running from 1 January through 31 December.
I have changed my mind about one minor point. Back then, I suggested a bag limit to make sure there were enough to go around. I think I might also have proposed a short closed season on does. In retrospect, I tbink I was wrong. There should be no bag limit, and no closed season on does. People should have to get them while the getting’s good.
What disturbs me is that I think many/most people think I’m kidding, but I’m completely serious. The only real solution to a vermin problem is to eradicate them.
The Republicans like to spend other peoples’ money as much as the Democrats. They just spend it on their supporters. The F35 is projected to cost 1.5 trillion dollars over its lifetime and it can’t even fly in bad weather. They are happy to subsidize and bail out large banks and corporations. They joined with Nancy Pelosi to block any oversight of the NSA.
Neither party is looking out for my interests.
Rick in Portland
Eventually they’re going to push too far and people really will be driving around with dead politicians strapped to their hoods. Politicians of all stripes are terrified of the people. Why else does the Heimatsicherheitshauptamt exist and why is it distributing military weapons and armored vehicles to civilian police departments? The feds are clearly preparing for a violent revolution. They believe the HSHA, military, and police will suppress any violence against the government, using whatever level of armed force is necessary. I’m sure there will be some slaughters of civilians, but it’s not going to work in anything but the short term, as Czar Nicholas and his family found out, to name just one of many examples.
This Republican isn’t happy about that, but it may just be Bob’s libertarian streak rubbing off on me. The only justification I have for the large bank bailouts is I think it was the cheapest way to cover the insured deposits.
Well, it is the legislated way to cover insured deposits. Our legislators committed our tax money to bail out somebody else’s problem. Our TAXES guarantee other people’s money from bankers gone beserk. That alone is a problem, IMO, because the wrong people pay for wrongdoing. Why should my decision on choosing a bank not put my money at risk if the bank goes topsy? There’s no question bank shareholders should bear the burden of their own losses—and they aren’t.
The tale of my grandparents during the Great Depression says it all: never put your eggs in one basket. One set of grandparents put all their money in one bank. It closed. They never saw their money again, AND had to pay for their house twice. The other set of grandparents had 2 banks accounts. One bank closed; the other remained solvent. Those grandparents went into the Great Depression with $500, and my dad told me, “they were rich.” They also had much more money in the other bank that my other grandparent set did, and lost it, but they had enough in the bank that survived to live without any stress at all through the GD.
My father’s father put his eggs in one basket just before the Depression too.
He bought, I dunno, 20 or 30 or so blocks of land in our suburb, about five km from the centre of Adelaide. When the Depression hit he could barely pay the council rates and other costs associated. One year he offered the local council a block of land in lieu of rates on all his blocks, they refused, they wanted the dough (as did everyone else.)
I’m not sure what happened, he was a small shopkeeper as well, and my father made deliveries for him as a kid. When my father turned 21 in 1945 and was serving in the RAAF in Britain his father gave him two adjoining blocks of land upon which they built the family home on the early Fifties.
Our family has never had much luck with real estate… 🙁
I look at real estate as a cost of living. Some people—like my father—cannot conceive that any real estate could possibly be considered anything but an investment. My dad divested himself of all real estate when I was in high school, because he thought the next Great Depression was right around the corner and any land he owned would become worthless. When I bought a house, he nearly had conniption fits arguing against such a thing.
My position was that (in that time) it would actually cost me more to rent a house (which is what he did for most of his life) of the same size. If worse came to worst, I could walk away from the house and give it back to the bank and be out less money than it would be if I forked over more money during the period in rent payments. That did not convince him.
Of course, I inherited Tiny House, but the family with whom I share ownership, do not want to give it away—such being the current state of house prices in Tiny Town. Anything is gravy to me, but the fact my grandfather and his brother built the house with their own 4 hands is an emotional factor that makes a difference to them.
My mother’s uncle was a multimillionaire at least twice and I think three times during the Depression. He was in airplanes/airports and made a bundle, lost it, made another one, lost it again, etc. Unfortunately, he died broke.
One of my ancestors was a storekeeper in Haverhill, MA, near the area where more ancestors left from much earlier to move to Nantucket. The storekeeper moved his operation to NYC where it became Macy’s Department Store. He later sold out his ownership to the Schwartz family, who had the jewelry concession there. Rowland Hussey Macy. My grandfather was Wendell Macy Hardy, and I have an old picture of him as a toddler with his Nantucket cousins in 1898.
Naturally we don’t have a cent from any of that stuff. Including the old houses still extant there from the 17th- and 18th-C’s.
Unfortunately, he died broke.
The current government plan. With the added bonus they will also determine when you die.
Chuck wrote:
“…the fact my grandfather and his brother built the house with their own 4 hands is an emotional factor that makes a difference to them.”
My father and his father built the family home in 1952, sub-contracting the stuff they couldn’t do themselves. Three kids grew up there, and for the last 10 years only mum lived there. When she moved in to a retirement village in 2007 we had to sell it. When I walked out the door for the last time I walked out the door. It was demolished within a year (it was placed in the middle of two blocks of land, and the new owner built two homes in its place.) It was their property and I was indifferent to the building’s fate. I remember the people and what happened, but the house was just a house.
When mum once went to see the house she grew up in it had seen major changes and she was very upset. My father’s parents place, which was next door to ours, is still there, even though it was built in around 1930. It’s a now popular style called a “bungalow” or “California bungalow, and is my favourite style.
When I sell my current place that’s it. I’ve been here over 28 years but when I walk out the door I walk out the door. Sure, I’ll take some photos, but it’s just a house.
I have lived in 16 different houses/apartments during my life, not including college housing. I never ‘loved’ any of them. Like you say, it is just a house.
The market here in Tiny Town is looking up. The hundreds of foreclosures are finally off the market, but I am told that there are around 400 vacant houses within the city limits. There are 2 on my block alone and the street is not a through one and only 3 blocks long overall. Just driving in and out of town, I can see that almost every street has vacant houses—not all of them with sale signs on them. I’m preparing for a move in the spring to be closer to my work, and will suggest to my relatives that we just bulldoze the house and let it return to unimproved property for the tax rolls. The house has no built-in closets, and that makes it practically unmarketable, although it has the best central air and hot water heat I have ever been around. As a friend once said, “Architects learned a lot between the 1920’s and the 1970’s.” Tiny House was a popular style in 1923 when it was built.
We almost had it sold before the housing collapse, but the buyer, who was pre-qualified, had their pre-qualification pulled right when they made the offer, as the housing bubble burst and banks stopped lending.